RO maple sap concentrate

I've read of several people using the raw sap in replacement for their water...

give it a shot if you want to play around.

 

I'd remember that you need like 20 gallons of sap to make a gallon of maple syrup. If you use this to mash, you'll be hurting your efficiency a little. Sugar water goes in, sugar water goes out.

I've also heard that grade B maple syrup is less fermentable than good quality maple syrup. That's a good thing because more residual flavor is left in the beer and doesn't ferment out.

That's about all I've heard about maple beer. If I ever try to make a maple beer the syrup is going directly in the keg.

 

Not sure I understand the RO process with maple sap in the context of brewing beer. It seems you'd end up with all the minerals that went in, in a concentrated form, just as you would if you removed the water using the centuries old traditional boiling method. The RO process will only remove the water from the sap, nothing else. The good stuff, in this context, would be the waste line in a typical water purification system. Perhaps ironically, you could add the resulting 'pure' water back in when you boil. Which raises the obvious question, why bother? Why not just use the sap? Boil it down to what you need.

 

All your maple flavors would be concentrated by a factor of ~3, as would the contribution to the OG. Whether this is a big deal depends on your recipe and goals. To look at it another way, it would be the rough equivalent of adding 48oz of maple syrup to a 5 gallon recipe brewed with ordinary water. YMMV, as you know, the numbers can vary a lot from sugarhouse to sugarhouse and day to day at the same place.